It seems I haven’t posted the traditional annual mirror stats for 2016 yet. Well, lets fix that: Here are the most used mirrors on ftp.fau.de in 2016:
| Rank | Mirror | Traffic 2016 in TB | Rank/Traffic 2015 (for comparison) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | qtproject (Qt Toolkit) | 264 | 1 / 199 |
| 2 | kiwix (offline Wikipedia) | 262 | 2 / 179 |
| 3 | osmc (Open Source Media Center) | 172 | – / 35 |
| 4 | opensuse | 145 | 4 / 139 |
| 5 | mint | 134 | 3 / 179 |
| 6 | eclipse | 131 | 6 / 97 |
| 7 | fedora | 115 | 5 / 100 |
| 8 | cdn.media.ccc.de (Talk recordings from CCC conferences) | 91 | 7 / 83 |
| 9 | ctan (comprehensive TEX archive network) | 76 | 8 / 63 |
| 10 | tdf (The Document Foundation – LibreOffice) | 58 | 9 / 48 |
Comparing this list to last year, the first thing one notices is the new entry on rank 3: OSMC generates a steady amount of traffic, with visible peaks whenever they do a release. They were not in the 2015 top ten because we only started mirroring it in Q4 of 2015.
Linux mint dropped from rank 3 last year to rank 5 this year, with much less traffic than last year. And that is despite a slightly different counting that should actually have increased their numbers: We are now summing up the two parts of the mirror, the ISOs and the packages. Not because we want to do that, but for technical reasons – we cannot always distinguish between the two in the stats, and not summing them up would make the stats even more wrong. Now judging from the stats, we must have been dropped from their mirror list for ISO downloads around June of 2016. From there to the end of the year, almost no requests for the Mint ISOs have hit our server. As to why we were dropped, we haven’t got the slightest clue – we got no notification about the removal. We did get a notice about being readded at the beginning of 2017 though.
Last years rank 10, videolan, dropped off the list – it would be on rank 13 this year.
Rank 1 and 2, Qt and kiwix, are really close head to head.
For all other mirrors, they swapped positions here and there, and all of them generated a little more traffic than the year before, but there were no big changes.
Lets take a look at IPv6 traffic only:
| Rank | Mirror | IPv6 Traffic 2016 in TB | Rank/Traffic 2015 (for comparison) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | kiwix (offline Wikipedia) | 34.6 | 3 / 14.5 |
| 2 | cdn.media.ccc.de (Talk recordings from CCC conferences) | 27.6 | 2 / 15.2 |
| 3 | mint | 20.8 | 1 / 22.6 |
| 4 | qtproject (Qt Toolkit) | 19.1 | 5 / 11.5 |
| 5 | opensuse | 18.4 | 6 / 10.8 |
| 6 | debian | 17.3 | 7 / 9.3 |
| 7 | fedora | 13.0 | 4 / 11.5 |
| 8 | pclinuxos | 12.9 | – / 0.7 |
| 9 | ubuntu | 12.6 | – / 3.2 |
| 10 | tdf (The Document Foundation – LibreOffice) | 12.3 | 8 / 8.1 |
With the exception of Linux Mint, where I’ve already explained the reason above, all mirrors had more IPv6 traffic, sometimes significantly more.
This is also visible in the total IPv6 traffic over all mirros: 13.68% of all traffic in 2016 was IPv6, up from 10.54% in 2015.
There are still huge differences in the IPv6 traffic share between the different projects mirrored, and most of the time it isn’t really clear why. One example where it is clear though is cygwin, with an IPv6 share of pretty much 0%: They use a setup-tool that downloads individual packages from the mirrors, and it seems this tool only does IPv4.